On the eve of the first election of the Obama era, the Washington Post ran a long profile Monday of the White House’s „low-profile” political director, Patrick Gaspard. It was an unremarkable story filled with unremarkable tidbits about how the unassuming Gaspard has thrived in a West Wing filled with political heavies–save for one quote from Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina that caught my eye. Explaining what sets Gaspard apart from his White House peers, Messina said, „We are all campaign hacks. Patrick is a movement guy. He really came up through the movement and the grassroots.”

This was meant to be an innocuous bit of inside baseball touting Gaspard’s labor roots and progressive bona fides. But it wound up revealing the Obama White House’s biggest weakness: The president’s top advisers are not just overly political, they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with „hacks”–campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times.

That doesn’t mean these staffers are unprincipled or unqualified; they are widely known to be smart, skilled team players. But they (and the few loyalists who fill out the Obama inner circle) come collectively to their highly influential jobs with a monochromatic mindset. And increasing evidence over the last several months–most notably the dramatic drop the president has suffered among independents–has indicated that this mindset is limiting, diminishing and potentially finishing to the Obama presidency.

Now, new presidents always bring trusted campaign advisers into their administrations. But they usually mix them with a range of serious governing professionals, who come with a very different ethos, to balance out the politicos and bring diverse perspectives into the presidential inner circle. This White House is disproportionately different. But Obama’s West Wing is devoid of governing wise men (think Leon Panetta for Bill Clinton, James Baker for the first George Bush and Clark Clifford for multiple Democrats). It is stocked almost exclusively with political pros and a handful of Friends of Barack whose main and often dominant frame of reference is partisan or personal.

The most obvious cases are the message gurus:

–Senior Adviser (and top strategist) David Axelrod has been a political consultant most of his adult life and never worked in government.

–Communications Director Anita Dunn has been working on campaigns for the last three decades, exclusively as a political consultant since 1993; she did brief stints as a low-level staffer in the Carter White House and on Capitol Hill after that.

–Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ main line of work has been as a flack for congressional and presidential campaigns; his government work is limited to a short run with a North Carolina House member and a preparatory stint in Obama’s Senate office.

The rest of the West Wing inner circle is almost equally political or personally connected. To wit:

–Jim Messina, who was chief of staff on Obama’s campaign, did serve as chief of staff for two senators and a House member; but he has also done extensive work on campaigns, to the point that he labels himself a hack.

–Senior Adviser Pete Rouse is a longtime Capitol Hill veteran and not a campaign mercenary, but he served as Obama’s pre-run chief of staff in the Senate and is an obvious loyalist.

–The least strictly political of the bunch is Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, who worked in Chicago city government for eight years and in the nonprofit sector for many more; but she is in the White House chiefly as the First Friend.

Then there is Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who served as deputy COS in the Clinton White House; as such he is the only top Obama adviser (excluding policy people) with any real executive branch experience. Emanuel also served six years in Congress. But he is not known as Rahm-bo for nothing: Emanuel made his bones as a hard-charging politico in Illinois and with the Clinton campaign in 1992, and then as the chief strategist behind the Democrats’ takeover of the House in 2006. Which means if you are counting solely on Rahm (of whom I am a fan) to fill the elder statesman role, you’re going to have trouble being uniter-in-chief.

What’s missing from this group, besides diversity of experience and interests, is a senior adviser or two with an independent point of view who could carry Obama’s post-partisan portfolio. Someone who would wake up every day thinking about how to form broad-based coalitions, to deepen the confidence and trust of independents and non-rabid Republicans in government, and push Obama to honor his promise to change politics-as-usual in Washington. Or at minimum, someone not ingrained or trained to think that the Republicans are the enemy.

From what I can tell, this void has left the Obama White House with a blind spot that has hurt the president and his agenda. Start with staffing decisions. The head of legislative affairs, Phil Schiliro, has a deep knowledge of the Hill and is widely respected among his peers. But he is a protégé of the hyper-partisan and far left-wing House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman. No one in his right (or center) mind would ever pick someone with Schiliro’s profile to be the president’s lead Hill liaison if his goal were to build better relations with the minority, break the partisan gridlock or offset House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s many political liabilities.

To the contrary, this hack-stacked White House too often falls prey to the us vs. them mentality of campaigns, which has lowered the president’s stature. Look at the so-called war on Fox. Regardless of whether you think Fox is biased or in cahoots with the Republicans, how does it serve the president’s interests (let alone the country’s) for his White House to be seen to be purposely picking a partisan fight with a news network that is widely watched by voters who help decide elections? I am all for holding Fox accountable (disclosure: I appear frequently on its air), but that task should be left to the DNC or other political allies. The fact that the White House, led by Dunn, couldn’t see that distinction is telling–and troubling.

So too was the strident attack President Obama personally leveled against the insurance industry in one of his recent weekly radio addresses. Again, I think the administration is well within its rights and historical norms to aggressively defend its policies and point out distortions and inaccuracies of critics. But the president’s broadside against the insurance companies went well beyond that. „It’s smoke and mirrors,” the president said of the industry’s tactics. „It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, ‘Take one of these, and call us in a decade.’ Well, not this time.”

That’s not the tone of a president who is trying to elevate our politics. Indeed, it sounds a lot more like the divisive rhetoric that infects the most vitriolic liberal and conservative blogs. Rants like this would cheapen any president, making him seem like just another partisan brawler. But they are particularly harmful to Obama because of the high standard he set for himself and the partisan enmity that has been steadily building since he took office. If there were a bridge-builder in Obama’s inner circle–like former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux or former DNC chairman Bob Strauss of Texas–he or she probably would have stopped that misguided hit from ever going to the president’s desk. But in this West Wing, Axelrod could have written it.

It also seems that the hack mentality has contaminated the White House’s policy and tactical decisions. For example, when the president knew he was going to have to blow up the deficit to pass a major stimulus bill, why didn’t he propose a substantial menu of spending cuts ahead of the release of his budget in February? It would have shown that he was not just another big-spending liberal and that he was serious about making change. The problem was, as far as I could tell, none of his top advisers and strategists were focused on how the spending issue would play among independents or pushing the president to the responsible center.

Or look at health care. Many Republicans have been keen on obstructing the president from the beginning. But the main reason they have been able to be so blatant is that the White House has done little to suggest it is willing to meet the GOP in the middle on some of its priorities. An easy one would have been malpractice reform, which the president ended up throwing a bone to in his address to Congress in September anyway. Why wasn’t that put on the table in May, when it would have made a much bigger impact on political perceptions? Could it be that the campaign hacks calling the shots in the White House have been conditioned to not cross the trial lawyers?

Some may argue that these choices reflect that reflexive liberalism of the president and most of his advisers, and there is some truth to that. But Obama has shown he can be an innovator and even an iconoclast in challenging Democratic sacred cows–consider the aggressive reform agenda that the president and his education secretary are pursuing. What he clearly needs–and what he is clearly lacking–are high-level White House advisers to nurture those creative and pragmatic impulses.

That largely explains the gap that many perceive between the president’s rhetoric and the actions of his administration. And it goes to show just how important staff is to governing. Yes, the president is the decider. But when you have two wars going on, many decisions are deferred and delegated. Even the decisions the president does make are often shaped or pre-determined by the choices his top aides bring to him. (Read Angler, Barton Gellman’s excellent book on Vice President Cheney, to see how the vice president used his outsized gate-keeping role to steer policy outcomes.)

To address this personnel problem, Obama can take one of two paths. The first and easiest option would be to bring in a David Gergen-like figure as a senior counselor to inject a different perspective to those critical West Wing strategy sessions and focus on rebuilding the president’s trust numbers with swing voters. The second–and more painful–would be to do a house cleaning, as Clinton did in the dark days of his first term, when he replaced George Stephanopoulos, brought in the bipartisan Gergen to bolster his centrist credentials, installed Panetta as his chief of staff and turned to Dick Morris, Mark Penn and Doug Schoen as his top strategists.

Obama could quickly help himself by trying the first option and tapping an independent-thinking Democratic wise man like Bob Kerrey (who is conveniently leaving his post as president of the New School) to balance out his inner circle. That’s a much more realistic scenario. But unless the economy takes a miraculous turn in the next six months, he will have no choice but to make some wholesale changes–not just to sack some hacks but reorient the White House’s focus on reclaiming the political center. It may take a bloodletting in the 2010 midterms to force the issue. Either way, Obama will come to realize that his best chance of winning re-election will be to bring in the best governing types.

Dan Gerstein, a political communications consultant and commentator based in New York, is the founder and president of Gotham Ghostwriters. He formerly served as communications director to Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and as a senior adviser on his vice presidential and presidential campaigns. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

Cleveland are 3-3 this year, and that is what happens when you just walk out of the court without shaking hands and anger David Stern. Without the help from the guys in stripes, Cavaliers look rather ordinary. I have said it before, I will say it again tonight, they’ll be looking to trade Shaq by the All-Star game, or diminish his role into a cheerleading position. The „great one” cannot have competition, on or off the court.